Can AI help lawyers avoid burnout?

What do AI and burnout have in common? Well, they’re both facts of life in the 2024 legal profession. The difference is that people love to talk about the former, but don’t spend nearly enough time talking about the latter.

Our State of In-house 2024 report revealed that fully half of in-house lawyers have suffered burnout in their roles. So why are lawyers more likely to experience burnout than other people? Let’s look at the causes.

The first group of causes are extrinsic. Being a lawyer is a hard job. Outside pressures that lawyers experience in their jobs can increase the strain on their wellbeing and mental health. Lawyers are often deluged in low-value, low-complexity, repetitive work. According to our survey this is still the number 1 pain point of legal teams.?

This can grind you down and create decision fatigue; it also engenders feelings of inadequacy that you’re spending your time doing work you could do with your eyes closed. It can feel like you’re stalling professionally, exacerbated by the fact that legal is often at the back of the queue when it comes to getting additional headcount in a high-growth business.

The second group of factors are intrinsic. As Annmarie Carvalho explained at Scaleup GC this year, lawyers are likely to be wired a bit differently: insecure overachievers, perfectionist levels of detail, fear of failure, and so on. I certainly recognise lots of those qualities in myself.

So knowing the causes, how can you treat them? Therapy is obviously an amazing tool to help with the intrinsic factors and something I encourage everyone concerned with their level of burnout to explore. But therapy treats the symptoms, not the cause. The more pertinent question is? how can lawyers elevate themselves from the constant barrage of low-value work?

Automation is the most obvious answer for time- and resource-constrained lawyers.?

There are lots of different ways to automate legal work. Having AI Agents completing complex tasks is cool and we’re excited for the AI-native future of legal, but simple shortcuts like having a Slackbot link to an NDA template when someone asks for one can save lawyers time without needing new systems.

Recording Loom videos responses to common legal questions that you can fire off instead of having calls can save time too (I can reveal that Jurors are big fans of Michael Haynes ‘It’s Legal Here!’ videos).

The key thing is to start small and start safely. AI has moved very quickly and lawyers are rightly concerned that it is adopted safely and responsibly.

That’s why on the 18th of July we’re hosting a webinar on Implementing responsible AI policies, with an expert panel that includes Cohere ’s Legal Director, Kosta Starostin , and CybSafe ’s GC, Annick O'Brien, CIPP/E, CIPM . Click below to sign up:

Annmarie also talked at Scaleup GC about the importance of incremental, even marginal gains. If you’re looking for a healthier work-life balance as a lawyer, it doesn’t have to mean a dramatic new approach.

But by taking small steps to gradually improve or remove process work for your plate, you can win back time and breathing room to stop and actually enjoy the role, and the privileged and unique position you occupy in the company.

With all the talk of investment booms and explosive growth and Nvdia’s market cap, it’s easy to forget that the benefits of AI are not simply financial. New technology deployed the right way could make an incalculable difference to our health and wellbeing. It’s hard to put a price on how valuable that is.